"YouTubers should have to pay out a huge portion of their revenue to the developers from which they steal all their content. [Ad] revenue should be shared with developers. This should be built into YouTube. Anything else is basically piracy.

"If you generate money from putting my content on your channel, you owe me money. Simple as that. If you buy a movie, are you then allowed to stream the entirety of it publicly for people to watch for free? No, because that's illegal.

"Systems are in place to prevent that. But buy Fez, put ALL of it on YouTube, turn on ads, make money from it and that's TOTALLY FINE. And the developer should in NO WAY be compensated for their work being freely distributed to the world. Right. Makes sense."

After a negative reaction, Fish tweeted "Nevermind" and locked down his account, though it appears he may have deleted it entirely. (Twitter can be a stressful place, so I hardly blame him if he's abandoned it.)

"For sure, the biggest Youtubers have had a much bigger impact on our traffic and sales compared to the biggest sites we've been covered on," Aaron San Filippo, creator of Race the Sun told the publication.

"I'm not really aware of anygames site for whom coverage of your game will result in an immediately noticeable sales spike," Cliff
Harris of Postitech Games said, "but I have seen that with a YouTube Let's Play."

There's a lot more to the story than just developer testimony, but I think this speaks to the relationship between YouTubers, the games press, fans, and game developers like Phil Fish as well as publishers and the rest of the industry. Sometimes it's adversarial, sometimes it's friendly, but it's almost always some form of symbiosis.

If I write about a video game and someone doing Let's Play videos on YouTube reads my piece and then decides to do videos of it on YouTube, and then that leads to boosted sales of the game itself...everybody wins.

I wrote about the game, and maybe I get mentioned in the video, potentially bolstering readership. The YouTuber makes some ad revenue. The game developer sells some games.

I don't believe that in this equation I am owed anything from either the YouTuber or the game developer, even though it was---hypothetically, at least, and second hand---my post that led to those increased sales.

Nor should the game developer expect revenue sharing from the YouTuber when the only thing that really equated to was free advertising for their game, leading to increased sales.

It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship that leads someone like Phil Fish to make these claims. He equates posting an entire movie on YouTube with a Let's Play video, but these are two very different things. In the Let's Play viewers are able to see whether or not they want to purchase the game. They also come for the personality of the person playing it and their reaction, either because that person is entertaining or informative or valuable in some other way. This creates value for both the developer and the consumer, as well as the middle man. Revenue sharing at this point would be very much like asking someone to pay you for the advertising.

But as we all know, that's not how advertising works. If you have a product in most other industries, you have to pay your hard-earned cash to get this type of exposure. Phil Fish and other game developers get it for free with Let's Play. Sure, YouTubers use footage of games to meet their own bottom line, but they're not pirating and selling copies of games, which is what posting movies to YouTube would essentially be.

Nintendo recently announced a revenue sharing platform for Let's Play videos. This is a huge mistake. Nintendo should make its money off of game sales, not game footage and commentary. I don't expect to have to share my own earnings for writing about their games, and indeed it would sound utterly absurd to do so. But what's so different about footage and the written word? In neither case are viewers/readers able to actually play the game.

Rather, they're able to see whether or not it's worth their time to begin with.

I also believe that this perspective fundamentally misunderstands the nature of new media, in which sharing and hacking and altering content can also lead to that content going viral, gaining new traction in new online spaces, and so forth. Or else Phil Fish understands that each time he says something like this on Twitter, the attention makes new potential customers aware of his games. Sort of like how Let's Play works.

If anything, developers should be giving YouTubers a cut of their increased sales---but that would be an entirely new kettle of ethical fish to deal with, as it were. So maybe the current system isn't actually all that bad.

P.S. If someone were to post merely game footage with no commentary, analysis, or juvenile screaming then perhaps Fish would have a point. On the other hand, it's less likely people would show up to watch. After all, the reason people watch PewDiePie videos isn't merely to see games. It's to see and listen to the man himself. Others, like EpicNameBro, are often watched by people heavily invested in games like Dark Souls already. In neither case is the YouTuber somehow negatively impacting sales. Quite the contrary.

And here's the thing: If I want to playDark Souls, I'll play Dark Souls. If I want to listen to EpicNameBro talk about it, I'll go to his YouTube channel. These are two very different things.